FORMER President Jerry Ford, who died Tuesday in Palm Springs at age 93, almost died in Sacramento 31 years ago because California politicians were playing one-upsmanship.

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a disciple of mass murderer Charles Manson, pointed a .45-caliber pistol at Ford on Sept. 5, 1975, as the president walked from the Senator Hotel to the state Capitol, but was wrestled to the ground by an alert Secret Service agent. The pistol had cartridges in its magazine, but none in the chamber and Fromme, then 26, is still in federal prison.

How Ford happened to be in Sacramento that day, scarcely a year after becoming the nation’s first — and still only — unelected president, is a bit of political trivia that seeped out only after the fact.

Jerry Brown had been the

Democratic governor for just eight months, a 37-year-old wunderkind given to sleeping on mattresses, making vaguely left-wing pronouncements on the human condition and being unpredictable. And he was irritating business leaders by refusing to commit to speaking to the “Host Breakfast,” an annual gathering of business moguls in Sacramento.

They decided to teach him a political lesson by prevailing on Republican Ford to make the speech instead.

Ford pleased the hundreds of business leaders gathered in the Sacramento Convention Center by delivering a paean to capitalism (and doubly pleased the chairman of the event, Sacramento Union publisher Carlyle Reed, by mentioning the paper in his speech).

After a brief pause at the Senator Hotel, Ford was to make his only public appearance of the day by walking across the street to the

Capitol, shaking hands with well-wishers along the route. Ford had moved about 150 feet up the Capitol sidewalk when Fromme pulled the pistol out of her long red skirt and pointed it at him, only to be grabbed by Secret Service agent Larry Buendorf and hustled away in a Sacramento police car.

A phalanx of beefy Secret Service agents surrounded the startled Ford, one shouted “get down, let’s go,” and they half-dragged him into the east

entrance of the Capitol and then into the nearby governor’s office for a scheduled courtesy call on Brown.

Oddly enough, Ford never mentioned the incident to Brown.

(A personal note: I had joined the Sacramento Union’s Capitol Bureau earlier that year and was to cover Ford’s speech to the Legislature. I was waiting in the Senator Hotel for an advance copy of the speech when someone rushed in and said there had been an assassination attempt on Ford. I ran over just in time to see Fromme being pushed into a police car; Ford had already been whisked into the Capitol. I checked in with the Union reporter who had been covering Ford’s walk, Veda Federighi, who was only a few feet from the president during the incident, then gathered as many other eyewitness accounts as I could.)

Ford’s speech to the Legislature, ironically enough, was about cracking

down on violent crime. He later reappeared before reporters at the Senator Hotel, praised local police and the Secret Service and insisted that despite his brush with assassination, he still liked California. “I wouldn’t under any circumstances feel that one individual in any way represented attitudes on the part of the people of California,” he said. “I just think Californians were being friendly and hospitable.”

He must have been sincere since he returned to California two weeks later for a speech in San Francisco, only to have a woman named Sara Jane Moore pull a pistol and actually fire a shot at him. Even that experience did not sour Ford on California, however. He carried the state in the 1976 presidential election (while losing to Jimmy Carter) and eventually made his permanent post-presidential home in Palm Springs.

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